Article 3

For the purposes of this Regulation, the following definitions apply: ‘conviction’ means any final decision of a criminal court against a natural person in respect of a criminal offence, to the extent that the decision is entered in the criminal records of the convicting Member State; ‘criminal proceedings’ means the pre-trial stage, the trial stage and the execution of the conviction; ‘criminal record’ means the national register or registers recording convictions in accordance with national law; ‘convicting Member State’ means the Member State in which a conviction is handed down; ‘central authority’ means an authority designated in accordance with Article 3(1) of Framework Decision 2009/315/JHA; ‘competent authorities’ means the central authorities and Eurojust, Europol and the EPPO, which are competent to access or query ECRIS-TCN in accordance with this Regulation; ‘third-country national’ means a person who is not a citizen of the Union within the meaning of Article 20(1) TFEU, or who is a stateless person or a person whose nationality is unknown; ‘central system’ means the database or databases developed and maintained by eu-LISA which hold identity information on third-country nationals who have been subject to convictions in the Member States; ‘interface software’ means the software hosted by the competent authorities allowing them to access the central system through the communication infrastructure referred to in point (d) of Article 4(1); ‘identity information’ means alphanumeric data, fingerprint data and facial images that are used to establish a connection between these data and a natural person; ‘alphanumeric data’ means data represented by letters, digits, special characters, spaces and punctuation marks; ‘fingerprint data’ means the data relating to plain and rolled impressions of the fingerprints of each of a person's fingers; ‘facial image’ means a digital image of a person's face; ‘hit’ means a match or matches established by comparison between identity information recorded in the central system and the identity information used for a search; ‘national central access point’ means the national connection point to the communication infrastructure referred to in point (d) of Article 4(1); ‘ECRIS reference implementation’ means the software developed by the Commission and made available to the Member States for the exchange of criminal records information through ECRIS; ‘national supervisory authority’ means an independent public authority which is established by a Member State pursuant to applicable Union data protection rules; ‘supervisory authorities’ means the European Data Protection Supervisor and the national supervisory authorities.

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Source: EUR-Lex (Cellar) · retrieved 2026-11-13 · Text as adopted (Official Journal); later amendments are not incorporated in this text.